Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to encourage Integrated Care Boards to commission Referral Management Systems to reduce the significant time taken by primary care in chasing secondary care referrals and appointments.

The Government is committed to cutting waiting times for secondary care appointments, which in turn should minimise the time that general practitioners spend chasing referrals. As a first step, we have seen the waiting list reduce by over 190,000 and have provided 2.5 million extra appointments since July 2024.

The Government is also committed to optimising referrals through more effective models of triage which allow patients with the most urgent health needs to be prioritised and can be used to redirect referrals to an alternative service better suited to the patient’s needs (including in primary or community services where that is best for the patient). Referral management systems are one model of triage. The Elective Reform Plan (ERP), published in January 2025, commits to developing an implementation toolkit for triage services, by March 2026, and to working with integrated care boards to put in place clinical triage standard operating procedures for high-volume specialties.

The NHS Electronic Referral System (e-RS) is a national digital platform for referring patients from primary care into elective secondary care service. The ERP commits to improving e-RS throughout 2025/26 and beyond, to enhance information sharing between primary and secondary care and will help referrers in general practice know sooner what care their patient will receive and where, including whether their referral has been accepted in hospital.